Marketers often talk about 'Eyeballs' when they talk about various mechanisms for placing a message in front of an audience. The more 'eyeballs' a given medium or piece of content has the more value it has as marketing real-estate.

It occurred to Ashley and I the other day (while having one of our usual impassioned discussions about Attention Management) that eyeballs are also important for Attention Management.

If your eyeballs are not on the screen, then Touchstone can't alert you to anything! In nerd speak - what happens when the user is 'Idle'.

We have decided that in some future release Touchstone may need to detect idle users (or even allow users to set it to idle mode) and have it catch alerts until you log back on.

Doesn't sound too fancy an idea - but we hope to build in some clever caching that will bring the user up-to-date without overwhelming them with information.

In other news, we are working hard on the next build of our little Attention Engine. This will have been the longest gap between builds since we started development, but it will also be the most significant build since the original.

We will be releasing a version of Touchstone that is actually 3 parts (as always and originally envisioned). A feed adapter, an Attention Management Engine and a Visualization collection called 'Ariel'.

This, we hope, will encourage other developers to begin creating Adapters (and the brave ones can even attempt to write a visualization of their own) and establish clearly that Touchstone is less about a news-ticker for RSS and more about an all-purpose heads-up-display for alerts from any source.